Robin Wasserman’s Lithub article on the girling of contemporary culture gets to the heart of those niggling questions behind the term ‘girl’ and why, as women, the term raises hackles. How can it be offensive when girl-titled books — Gone Girl,The Girl on the Train, The Girl in the Red Coat — resonate with women readers?

I chafe at girl as much as the next woman when I can sense the judgment in it, the implication that I don’t measure up. And the idealist in me resents my own theory about the semantics of girlhood—believes that if the evolution from girl to woman insinuates an erasure of self, then it’s our expectations of female adulthood that should change, not our terminology. That we should reclaim woman, acknowledge with language what we argue with manifestos: that womanhood can be its own liberated, self-interested state of mind. But the pragmatist in me is glad that, in the meantime, we have the word girl to remind us. Glad that these characters exist, girl in name and spirit, that we’re living through a cultural moment dominated by women of all ages, still and always busy, trying to become who they are.

Barefoot at the Lake: A memoir of summer people and water creatures, by Bruce Fogle (September Publishing)

Along with other city families, the Fogles spent the months from June to August at their Lake Chemong cabin, involved in the local community and wasting days on Swallows-and-Amazons-type summer activities, while father, Morris, commuted to work in his Toronto florist shop. Life followed a familiar pattern: fathers were for day trips, “mothers were for everything else”.

In Barefoot at the Lake Bruce Fogle recalls the events of one summer, aged ten, which sparked his lifelong interest in animal welfare. It is 1954, fields are being cleared for new homes, destroying garter snake habitats, polio is still a worry, a rabid raccoon destroys a milk herd, and the vet discusses promising surgery trials that replace devastating cataracts. Uncle Reub has come to stay. He has abandoned his medical practice and sits outside in his city trousers and shoes, looking across the lake, a large unread book on his lap and tears in his eyes; sometimes he wears his pyjama top all day. Eventually, he leaves his look-out post and joins Bruce. They meander through meadows and sweetgrass, and visit the fort in the woods surrounded by snake skulls, and frogs hanging from the trees. Uncle Reub spins enthralling adventure tales; his probing questions encourage Bruce to wonder whether wildlife is more than a plaything for boyish pranks and experiments.

Everything is coloured through Uncle Reub: ‘It rained that afternoon, the kind of rain that came and went faster than my uncle’s moods.’ Over the summer, Bruce recognises his uncle’s shortcomings, and it stimulates a reconsideration of his silent father.

Nuanced, restrained prose delivers an unsentimental memoir. ‘A single strand of lake weed was as soft and as fragile as a strand of cooked spaghetti but when it was torn by storms from the bed of the lake and twisted and tied by the lake’s waves it became stronger than my father.’ The childlike sensibility and mature storytelling are finely balanced, punctuated with the kind of gentle humour and keen insight that comes with time and distance.

First-time novelists are often advised to stick to one protagonist and one antagonist; sketch minor characters lightly; use a three-act structure, either first person or omniscient (never both); show don’t tell. Bill Clegg’s impressive, Man Booker long-listed first novel breaks all such writing “rules”. It is a simple story: a few hours before her daughter’s wedding is due to take place in her garden in the fictional town of Wells, Connecticut, fire destroys June Reid’s house, killing everyone inside. Another writer could tip the story into sentimental schmaltz, but Clegg relies on understatement to deliver an effective counterbalance to the drama.

I found much to admire in Bill Clegg’s debut novel. You can read the full review in the Independent on Sunday

It isn’t surprising that Clegg’s imagination is an agreeable companion – we share a favourite book. Earlier this year he revealed A Scots Quair as one of his ‘books of a lifetime’. Readers of Bookrambler will know that Sunset Song, first in the trilogy, is a longtime favourite of mine – Chris Guthrie all time heroine, Long Rob of the Mill, favourite minor character. It’s a super trilogy.

For a quarter of a century Tony Angell observed the different pairs of western screech owls that nested in a box he’d nailed to a tree outside his bedroom window, but The House of Owls (Yale UP) is more than just a record of watching owls in a family setting. Angell is an artist, birder, and naturalist; The House of Owls is the apotheosis of a life-time’s engagement with owls. Steeped in the tradition of Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon, it blends taxonomy, ornithology, biogeography and autobiography illustrated with seventy-five ink drawings of owls in their natural habitat, and reinforced with range maps from The Birds of North America project at Cornell Lab. of Ornithology.

Angell’s interest in depicting owls as “an attractive and engaging species that deserved our interest and attention” was sparked by “intense exchanges over the fate of the birds” with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Attracted by the twin challenges of conservation and capturing on paper an elusive bird that hides in plain sight, he learned that an “emphasis on aesthetics rather than debate […] contributed to a climate where emotions settled down and a reasoned discussion ensued”. As an artist/naturalist “motivated to shape my subject to a degree that does justice to their emotional state”, Angell has since enjoyed a long and distinguished career responding creatively to the symbiotic relationship of birds and humans. For example, he illustrated and co-authored, with scientist John Marzluff, Gifts of the Crow:How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans, a groundbreaking investigation into bird behaviour based on innovative research into corvid brain activity (published in paperback in the UK in May 2015.) Through close observation, Angell believes “owls are inquisitive, playful, wrathful, determined, and even contemplative”, and through his meticulous drawings he attempts to communicate the “owlness that sets these birds apart from other avian species”.

A pair of blue tits nest in the table beneath a fir tree in my back garden every spring; a robin is a permanent resident; most evenings since May magpies have been fighting with crows for proprietorship of the back garden – they swoop over the roof and disappear into the denser woodland by the old railway that runs along the foot of the garden; a colony of rabbits live under the shed; four deer visit regularly every spring. This year, the garden has been busier with wildlife than last year, but not as busy as three years ago. In 2011, the year after the really bad winter, there were few wildlife visitors. I don’t keep a note of these visits, but after reading Charlie Elder’s book on nature conservation, I know I ought to.

Elder’s Few and Far Between: On the trail of Britain’s rarest animals (Bloomsbury)illuminates our understanding of what is lost, what we know we have now, and who is keeping watch on the state of our wildlife. Do we take it for granted that blue tits will always be there? What usefulness do they bring to the ecosystem of our gardens – what do they do for humans? Elder shows that such questions are the wrong way to think about wildlife and conservation. Some creatures exist just because they do – and that should be enough for our concerned watchfulness over their numbers.

During the nineteenth century many publishers operated under gentlemen’s trade agreements and managed to synchronize publication in both countries, offering authors reasonable terms. From Samoa, Stevenson communicated publishing schedules and terms with Cassell in London and Scribner’s in New York. Nevertheless, some unscrupulous publishers cut authors out of the process entirely.

Pearl’s bookaneers are romantic spies; self-educated, they “helped control the chaos caused by the broken copyright laws and the maelstrom of greed that rumbles just beneath the surface world of books”. They democratize the publishing industry, holding “as much sway as rich publishers and esteemed authors, more so in some cases, in determining the public’s access to books”. Whiskey Bill and Kitten from The Last Dickens (2010), a search for Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, reappear in The Last Bookaneer. However, it is the enigmatic American, Pen Davenport, together with his sidekick, Edgar Fergins, an English bookseller he meets in London, who race against time and Belial, Pen’s shadowy nemesis, to infiltrate the Stevenson household and steal his final manuscript before the law of copyright overtakes them.

Writing to his commander from Castle Stalker on Loch Laich, in Appin, a month before the Battle of Culloden, Captain Frederick Scott complained, “this Place is not marked on any of our maps”. William Roy’s subsequent maps included detailed surveys of important Roman sites, owing to Roy’s personal interest in antiquities, while swathes of land, settlements, islands, lochs, hills, and glens were unrecorded. When Roy’s surveyors were unable to access areas remote from Wade’s roads, he simply made “informed guesses” on location and topography. Britain’s national mapping agency has its origins in Roy’s 1747 commission to map the Scottish mainland. Nowadays, their slogan is “No-one Knows Great Britain Better”, nonetheless, pace Ordnance Survey, there are many ways of looking at a landscape: the personal as meaningful as social, historical, political or military significance.

Joanne Parker’s slim volume describes five very different maps: the cavers’ maps, the lost canal network, the megalith hunter’s map, ley hunter maps, and aeronautical maps; maps of the imagination and geographical maps. Parker situates each map within its relevant literary and historical context, but also moves away from text-based research and includes magazine-style snippets of interviews with contemporary cartographers in the field, together with references to websites and blogs in her inclusive approach to looking at the landscape through “a variety of lenses”.

Nora Ephron’s essay is usually quoted in inspirational pieces on reading, but it’s actually about time passing and the dreaded doom of gradually becoming dependent on something impersonal in order to accomplish something intimately personal. It was a useful way into writing today:

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

But my ability to pick something up and read it – which has gone unchecked all my life up until now – is now entirely dependent on the whereabouts of my reading glasses.

from I Feel Bad About My Neck, and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (2006; 2008)

I review the new edition of Alfred Watkins’ classic of landscape history, The Old Straight Track; Its mounds, beacons, moats, sites and mark stones, in this week’s Times Literary Supplement.

In his very full and wide-ranging introduction, Robert MacFarlane situates Watkins’ ideas and landscape photography within their literary, historical, cultural, and social contexts, and I found much to admire in his respectful approach to Watkins and his theory of the ley line system.

This weekend is the sixth anniversary of the BookRambler blog; six years of blethering about books, events, authors, writing, and publishing. If you’ve followed from the beginning or just started – thanks for reading.

I’ve read some wonderful books I’d never have discovered, met intelligent, truthful, funny, witty, and wise writers, and listened to brilliant, entertaining writers speak with passion about writing and books.

And yet,

When I started blogging I wanted to read the books I wanted to read, and to say what I wanted to say about them. I wanted to be critical and analytical; hold writing to account.

another [six years] over, and what have you done?

This anniversary is a reminder and a call to action to the earlier me who wanted to write fearlessly.

I find the more I blog about books, the more reticent I am becoming about saying what I want to say. I’m holding onto the fear that I’m not saying the right thing; afraid of causing offence; holding back because of what people will think about me through what I say about books.

I realise that what I talk about when I talk about books is a barrier to breaking away from the fear.

So I’m putting us on notice. I’m on the look-out for writing that can stand up to critical scrutiny: books I want to keep on my shelf and re-read many times over. And I’m on the look-out for those times when I want to shy away from saying what I want to say.